Commercial aviation systems are being designed to load their operational software via the Aeronautical Radio, Incorporated (ARINC) 615A specification, which uses the Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) as defined by RFC 1350. On a fast network, TFTP is a satisfactory file transfer protocol. On a slow network, TFTP becomes bogged down due to the Data/Acknowledgement (ACK) handshake between the client and server. The issue is that the ARINC 615A TFTP communication is being performed on a secure aircraft network where the loading paths are not given enough bandwidth to support the amount of data transferred. This is the case since the network bandwidth is mostly dedicated to flying the airplane. This combination of TFTP and a slow aircraft network causes the software load times to increase dramatically, thus increasing the aircraft downtime. Other commercial systems have solved this issue by going to a different file transfer protocol, but changing file transfer protocols for this application is not possible due to the ARINC 615A definition.
For the reasons stated above and for other reasons stated below which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the specification there is a need in the art for methods and systems for improved data transfers.